Quattrocento Read online

  But was Sally so far off the mark after all? She had loved him once, there was no question of that, and he had loved her, too, so the least he owed her was to consider what she had said. As he looked, he made himself think about what it was that he was seeing. Was it just a painting? He looked at Anna, and as he did, he forced himself to look, as impartially as he could, at what he felt. No. As hard as it was for him to admit, Sally was right. It wasn’t a painting of a woman he was seeing, it was a woman herself—a person, a real person who had once had a name, a life, a past and a future. A soul. Anna. No one falls in love with a woman in a painting, he reminded himself. So what does that make me? No one.

  Matt reread the letter. It was what he had feared. He had known from the very first moment he had seen the panel, even under the harsh lights of the basement stacks. And then, over the months as he worked, he had ignored the mounting evidence. The hard data of the panel and the analysis of the paint, the intuitive sense of technique and modeling—he had used his professional skepticism as a shield to deflect it all. But this last piece of evidence established the authorship of the panel beyond the shadow of a doubt. There could be no question, even to the most cautious. The painting was genuine. And there could be no avoiding what lay ahead, and just the thought of it filled him with sadness.

  chapter 8

  Matt stared at the glass of water sitting on the table in front of him, barely aware of the buzz of excited conversation eddying about the room like the drone of the cicadas in Gubbio. The glass shone in the powerful lights of the television cameras, the water sparkling as though electrified, and he touched it almost cautiously, half expecting a shock. The water was tasteless. He put the glass back down and avoided looking around the crowded gallery.

  “Shall we begin?” asked Silvio Petrocelli, head of the Department of Renaissance Art. Rich and modulated, his voice was made for a microphone.

  Begin? Matt smiled as he slowly turned the glass back and forth, watching his fingers, distorted by the water, grow and fade like fish darting around in an aquarium. Begin? It is finished. He circled the rim of the glass with his finger. Nothing. He dipped his finger into the cold water, just wetting it, and tried again. A note, faint but clear, rose into the air. Charles, sitting next to him, glanced over, and Matt lightened his touch so that the note faded until it was just barely audible, woven into the steady rise and fall of the measured inflections of Petrocelli’s voice. No one else seemed to notice, and Charles went back to listening to Petrocelli. Matt felt the sound as much as heard it, a pure note perfectly in tune. Slowly his finger circled, the note trailing behind like the white ribbon unwinding from the blade of a skater gliding on one leg.

  Charles took over. Leaning forward, he looked out at the audience over his glasses. “The correct dating of an object is perhaps our most difficult task,” he explained. “There are issues of attribution, of course, but we cannot even begin to consider them until we know if it was in fact possible for an artist to have done the work. However, we can date some materials with a fair precision. The wood of the panel, for example.”

  The panel, Matt thought. Four pieces of Lombardy poplar, joined and roughly planed. He loved poplars. They rose from the steep slopes of the terraced hills of the Apennines like the souls of the forgotten. Late in the day, when the soft golden light fused the air with the hills into a fresco of burnt umber and raw sienna, and the breeze that had awakened under the heat of the afternoon sun to stir the olive groves had grown still, the poplars stood out against the hillside, punctuating the dream that rose with the mist from the distant hills and valleys. It was not a dream, he thought, and lifted his finger slowly from the glass, wondering how lightly he could touch it before he lost all contact, before it floated away. Not a dream, all the lost afternoons he had spent with Anna. Like the sea in August, the quiet had surrounded them, holding the other world at bay, a distant shore imagined as much as seen. At those moments the arc of the small brass pendulum behind the polished glass became the waves, as unending as the ocean, and what he knew would happen to her was banished far off, out of sight over the horizon.

  It had been the Friday before Memorial Day, and although the calendar said it was a month too soon, to the birds and the squirrels and the early-morning runners in the park it was already the first day of summer. It would be a short day for Matt, for he planned to be off early, getting a head start on the traffic for the long drive to Watch Hill and the traditional opening of the house. He swung into his office, tossed his jacket onto the chair and then stopped, halfway through rolling up the sleeve of his shirt. Anna was gone.

  Matt stared at the desk where he had left the panel the night before. Why put it away? As far as the world was concerned, it was nothing, just an obscure portrait of an unknown woman. The clown gazed at him in blank surprise from under his glass dome, his arms spread as if to say, Who, me? Matt, feeling as though he had fallen out of an airplane, turned to the bench. He had left her there; he must have. Or put her on the bookshelf. He spun one way, then another, searching every possible surface, anyplace he might have laid the small panel, sick the entire time with the certainty that he only ever left her in that one spot, now vacant. Hot suddenly, and short of breath, he stood rooted to the floor, unable to move. Think. He would have to alert Security. No. First he would have to tell Petrocelli. Thinking of what he would say, the enormity of the loss became real, and he almost fell down. He reached for his coat, noticing the pattern of the tweed, the feel of the weave under his hand. He held it for a second and then shrugged it on, aware of every motion of his shoulders and arms, the weight of the coat, the hang of it.

  Matt’s own voice sounded oddly flat to him as he asked the secretary if Petrocelli was in. She didn’t seem to find anything amiss, though, responding with the absentminded cheeriness that was always exactly the same. Petrocelli glanced up when he entered, his eyes as black as cuttlefish ink over his half glasses. Charles slouched comfortably in the chair next to the desk, his long legs crossed at the ankles and his lab coat open. His elbow on the desk and his hand turned palm up as though he had been in the midst of a comment, he looked back over his shoulder.

  “Ah, there you are,” Petrocelli said, as though he had been expecting him.

  Matt stared at him, unable to speak. In Petrocelli’s hands was the small panel.

  “Have a seat,” Petrocelli continued, before turning his attention back to the portrait.

  Charles shifted his chair around. Matt, unable to do more than nod to him, dropped numbly into the chair in front of the desk. Silence flowed back into the room, the long seconds running together like cold linseed oil. Petrocelli sat, lost in reverie. “Remarkable,” he finally said, and smiled. The rigid lines of his face bent and softened, and Matt saw him for an instant as he never had, a man lost in the simple pleasure of a lovely work of art.

  Petrocelli put the painting to one side and picked up a plain file folder. Matt, recognizing it immediately, saw his own handwritten inscription on the tab: ANNA, in bold, slanting capital letters. He felt violated. How had Petrocelli known?

  Charles reached over and took the panel while Petrocelli began going through the documents Matt had assembled, one by one, over the past six months. He read each page, turning it carefully facedown when he was done. “So,” Petrocelli said, taking off his half glasses. He folded them in his hands and regarded Matt. “You visited the National Gallery last week.”

  Matt, his throat suddenly dry, swallowed. “Yes,” he said.

  “You took a personal day.”

  “Yes. I went to visit friends.” Petrocelli just stared, waiting, so Matt went on, like a badly tuned car dieseling after the ignition is cut off. “I took the portrait along to compare it to some of the things in their collection. I thought as long as I was there.”

  “Some things?”

  “Ginevra, mainly.”

  “And what did you discover?”

  Matt coughed. “Well,” he said. He glanced at Charles, who was en
grossed in the picture, seemingly oblivious to the conversation. “There are a number of similarities,” he said.

  “I gather as much from this.” Petrocelli tapped the folder with his glasses. “But you didn’t have to take the picture to see that. The results of all the tests are readily obtainable.”

  “I wanted to see the panel.” Matt had stood in the gallery lab, the paintings facedown, his friend Reynolds by his side. Matt had tried to do it while he was out of the room, but he wouldn’t budge. With the curator of the department away, Reynolds might have been willing to take it upon himself to remove the painting from exhibit, but there was no way he was going to let the picture out of his sight. His interest had been piqued. When Matt moved the two panels together the grain had joined as seamlessly as a closed door. Two separate pieces of wood suddenly became one.

  “Jesus,” Reynolds said.

  “A studio work,” Matt had hastened to say. “Leonardo used part of the panel and then took off for Milan. So someone else in Verrocchio’s studio used it. You know, it was lying around, ready to go. Lorenzo di Credi is my bet.”

  He had moved them side by side and then turned them back face up. First Ginevra, framed by a lushly growing juniper bush, an allusion to her name. With sharp features, and a mouth verging on querulous, she looked like a young girl used to having her way—demanding and capricious, but charming when she needed to be. And then there was Anna; quiet, observant, a generous face, patient. And yet, as different as they were, there was something that united them. It was in their eyes, Matt realized. Ginevra’s, as black as obsidian, and Anna’s, a deep green, but both with an animation and spirit, a sense of awareness, that showed a shared heritage, if only in the hand that had painted them.

  “Wow,” Reynolds had breathed.

  “Lorenzo di Credi,” Matt had repeated.

  “You think?” Reynolds asked, gazing at the portrait.

  “Stuart, old buddy. Promise me you won’t say anything about this just yet, okay?”

  “My lips are sealed,” his friend had replied.

  “You see, Matt,” Charles said, looking up from the painting, “it’s just that it looks a bit odd. You didn’t file the proper notification that you were taking the painting out of the museum—”

  Matt looked from him to Petrocelli in disbelief. “You think I was going to steal it?” he asked.

  “Well …” Charles looked distinctly uncomfortable.

  Petrocelli, his lips as thin as the paper knife on the green leather baize in front of him, didn’t answer.

  “I want a lawyer.” Matt stood.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Charles said. “You’re overreacting. Sit down.”

  “I had to find out from a phone call!” Petrocelli said. “ ‘Congratulations on your discovery.’ A Leonardo, for God’s sake! In my own department, a Leonardo, and this is how I find out!”

  “It looks a bit odd—” Charles interjected.

  “Odd!” Petrocelli spat out.

  “It’s not a Leonardo,” Matt said. “From the studio of Verrocchio, yes, but not Leonardo. Lorenzo di Credi, maybe.”

  “Lorenzo di Credi? Do you seriously think that Lorenzo could ever have painted something like this? Never. And all the tests match.” He tapped the folder. “The style is consistent. The underdrawing, the use of white lead, the craquelure—I don’t need to catalog it for you. Everything.” He opened the folder and began searching through the documents.

  Matt couldn’t answer. He had to admit that Petrocelli was right. The underdrawing had the characteristic cross-hatching that descended left to right, an unmistakable indication that the artist had been left-handed. As Leonardo had been. And the strokes matched perfectly. He had also been one of the first to use white lead to block out the figures, something that only could be known through X rays, which had been invented after the panel had already been entered into the museum’s collection. Ultraviolet photographs, another recent invention, showed the presence of madder lake, which had fallen out of use by 1830, replaced by modern synthetic aniline dyes. The dull brown of the background foliage, originally a luminous bottle-green, betrayed the use of verdigris—copper acetate—also long abandoned, and a staple of Leonardo’s palette.

  The craquelure was equally important. The gessoed ground had developed microscopic fissures, in turn fracturing the layers of paint and varnish above, like a slow current pulling a sheet of ice apart. It proved that the painting belonged on the panel, for no forger could have made the painting match the underlying spiderwebbing of the ground.

  Petrocelli found what he was looking for. He turned the document around and sailed it across the desk, where it came to rest in front of Matt. It was the FBI report.

  “It’s brilliant, Matt,” Charles said. “A stroke of genius.”

  “Leonardo leaves Florence for Milan in 1482,” Petrocelli said. The audience was quiet, intent on his every word. “We know from his own notebooks, confirmed by the diary of a monk who traveled with him part of the way, that in his packs he had two Madonnas. One was finished. That painting is the Benois Madonna, now in the Hermitage. The other, however, was incomplete when the monk saw it. Only the underdrawing had been executed, but he called it as perfect a rendering of the maternal spirit as he had ever had the good fortune to gaze upon. It has always been assumed, based on his description and the fact that it was with another Madonna, that it was to be one also. Instead, we discover that what Leonardo had in mind was a portrait. But to call it a portrait, no matter how beautiful, is to overlook its greater significance. It is truly a landmark in painting, for with this picture the age of humanism truly begins. He has secularized the Madonna. He has found divinity in the features of a mortal.”

  With that, the easel was suddenly bathed in a circle of light. Matt, glancing back, was not surprised to see that the spotlight had been carefully angled so that there would be no glare for the television cameras when the painting was revealed. Petrocelli nodded to Charles, who got up and walked to the easel as slowly as though he were escorting a bride to the altar. He lifted the cloth covering the panel and then stood aside, his back to the audience, his gaze on the painting. The momentary silence that greeted the unveiling ended in a wave of applause. As it rolled over the stage Petrocelli joined in, and then the men at the table, and at last it reached Charles, who began to applaud as a broad grin spread across his face. Matt felt the sound wash over him, wave after wave, carrying him ever farther away from Anna. She seemed so small, so vulnerable. She couldn’t even see him, looking out into the blinding glare, peopled only by the unblinking red eyes of the cameras. What had he done?

  The applause died away. Petrocelli faced the audience, one hand on the podium. “As you all know, there are only fourteen paintings in Leonardo’s oeuvre. To add another to the canon requires more than just scholarship or intuition, it demands proof beyond the shadow of a doubt. And to give you that, I’d like to introduce the member of our staff who made this remarkable discovery. Matthew O’Brien.”

  Throw a ball in the air, Matt thought, as hard as you can. Watch it sail up, higher and higher, as high as it can go. There is a moment when it stops, caught between rising and falling. But the world keeps moving. He saw again the white biplane, wings drooping like a hawk at the very moment it became airborne, and in that moment of balance between one world and the next, a man standing to one side. Where will it land, he wondered, and what has happened to the world it has left?

  “Matt?” Charles touched his arm.

  “Yes?” Matt glanced at him. “Oh,” he said. “Leonardo was one of the first artists in Italy to use the new medium of oil,” he began.

  “Louder,” someone called out. Charles moved his microphone in front of Matt.

  “Can you hear me now? Oil is great stuff. Tempera dries pretty quickly. There’s really not much you can do with it. Oil, though, is a whole new world. It’s much more malleable. You can build it up, blend it, push it around. You don’t even need a brush. Leonardo sometimes use
d his fingers. He left some papillary marks. Could we have the projectors, please?” Two images, side by side, flashed onto the screens behind him. “Thank you,” Matt said, leaning sideways to see the screens as he spoke into the microphone. “Fingerprints, as you can see. Neither is complete, but I showed them to a lieutenant in the NYPD and he told me that’s all they usually get. People don’t pick up a glass and put it back down, careful not to smudge the prints. He said what I have here is more than enough for a positive ID. I used a raking light—it lets you see the brushstrokes, which are like a signature. The one on the right is from the painting we have here at the museum.”

  “Anna,” Petrocelli added, breaking in.

  “Yes. At first I thought I had left one of my own prints on one of the microphotographs I had taken. But it was on the painting, and under an original layer of glaze, too, so it couldn’t be from a restorer or somebody handling it later. The one you’re seeing there on the left is from the portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci, in the National Gallery.”

  “The National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C.,” Petrocelli broke in again. “And we must express our gratitude to our colleagues for the unstinting and irreplaceable generosity and cooperation they extended to us in the laborious and exhaustive analysis and research that was put into this project.”

  “It’s an earlier work,” Matt said, “so I wasn’t sure if Leonardo would have been comfortable enough with the new medium to have worked it with that freedom, but apparently he was, because I did find that one. I—we—sent them down to the FBI just to be sure and they said the same thing. Left quadrant of the left index finger. Same angle of impression. Or as the lieutenant put it, ‘It’s the same MO, you’ve got him cold. A prosecutor would get a conviction on this alone.’